project
World Wide Water
multimedia—digital collage, archival CMYK print, typographics, generative writing, imaging, and motion design with Python and Processing

World Wide Water explores the dynamics and flow of waters across the United States and the world. The project connects geographies, histories, and relationships of people and environments, and visually explores issues surrounding quality, access, conflict, health, joy, and phenomena. Combining analog and digital processes with code, craft. writing, and research—the project connects the poetics of one place with those of another to form a visual, conceptual, and experiential mapping of water.

I began “World Wide Water” as a conceptual project which mixed fresh waters from locations around the world. In the early version, the visuals represent diverse and specific source locations and visualize the value of the waters, as it relates to scarcity and ease of access. In recent site-specific public installations of the project, I have projected animations of water words and images onto structures of past water industries at a canal lock in Richmond, VA; and onto a downtown building in Durham, NC (USA). The images, collages, and animations evoke the shapes and directed movement of ships and flow of water ripples; incorporate real and fictional words; and combine visual references to water technology, industries, swimming, bathing, immersion, access, health, and joy.

credits
© Rachele Riley
Special thanks to David Jonathan Ross and Allison Parrish. Funded in part through grants from the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

exhibitions + presentations
→ Public Art installation via Durham Productions, projection onto the Addison Building in downtown Durham, NC, 2024
→ Artist Talk at CAA, Chicago, IL, 2024
→ Faculty Exhibition at Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC, 2024
→ InLight 2021 with 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA, public art installation at Great Shiplock park, curated by Dr Tiffany Barber, Wesley Taylor, Park Myers, Nov 12–13, 2021